Excel signs pact with Paramount to market videos

KOLKATA: Feel more at home with the stars. Paramount Home Entertainment International of US, a sister company of Paramount Pictures and a Viacom group arm, is entering India for the first time.

To farm out its spectrum of video products in the country, Paramount has tied up with Excel Home Videos.

Interestingly, PHEI's earlier presence in the country dates back more than half a decade when the company used to market its video titles in India and overseas territories outside the US under the CIC banner in alliance with Universal Pictures. That joint venture was rolled back when Paramount and Universal decided to go their own ways.

"The deal with PHEI transpired recently and we will be responsible for distributing and marketing a variety of Paramount titles in India. This outing is set to kick off from August this year," M Kapasi, Excel's CEO, told ET . Kapasi said that Paramount movies will be circulated in VCD format since they are more popular now.

On the marketing front, the designing and packaging of the VCDs will be executed in India with approval from PHEI's team in the US. Excel will, of course, roll out the VCDs across the country through a network of marketing arrangements with distributorships in various cities.

Incidentally, Excel is also in talks with distributors in Sri Lanka to tie up distributing pacts with video companies there. By a rough call, Paramount's movie archives are made up of a stock of about 2,000-odd titles.

Though, it's difficult to predict the number of movies which Excel will bring into the country over a period of time, Kapasi said the package of titles distributed every year, in terms of unit numbers, will be comparable to the sales of VCDs of other Hollywood studio titles.

"The initial phase itself would see movies like Mission Impossible II and a host of Tom Cruise films arriving in the country. Cruise, as we know, has acted in quite a few Paramount films. These also include Mission Impossible, Top Gun, Days of Thunder, The Firm and Vanilla Sky," Kapasi said. There could also be other movies like Forrest Gump and the classic Ten Commandments.

He also mentioned a crop of 'musicals' that are part of the Paramount repository. The movies in this genre embrace films like Grease, Saturday Night Fever, Staying Alive, Flashdance and Rattle and Hum revolving around the band, U2. A tranche of popular movie series are on the cards too.